Friday, October 28, 2016

Pretty wild. I searched high and low for a video of it running with no luck.

Here's a standard car, which I think is quite pretty.

No one knows exactly how many of the fiberglass bodied coupes were built, but most seem to agree well under 300, with some guessing as few as 75 or so. Regardless of production numbers, about 50 are believed to remain.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

I can't even bring myself to say much of anything productive, so I'll just copy and past from the eBay ad.

"I purchased this car from the original owner when it had 66,000 miles. It truly drove like a new car and considering the age, the finish spoke of the care it had had. While a fan of the SC400 (I have another one with 28,000 original miles), I also wanted the look of a Corvetteso I had the rear end of the car (there was no accident damage to the car) cut off and replaced with 14 gauge steel to give a different look. I don’t know if I like it or not but it certainly attracts attention. I was concerned about the drivability with the shorter rear end but it has not suffered at all. I think it handles even better but that could be my imagination since at 77 years of age, I am not much of a hot rodder anymore. The shorter body length sure does make parking lots easier but there is no trunk at all for anything. The spare tire which had never been used lost its space as well. The tires are from Costco with a 70,000 mile warranty and have about 5,000 miles on them. The mufflers were removed and this provides a good deep V8 sound to the exhaust. The lower part of the passenger door got a couple of dents while it was in the shop doing the makeover."

I mean GODDAMNIT right? And that's coming from a committed atheist. Just ugh. Why? Why.

Incredibly, it sold for $5,000. Probably would have brought 125% of that had it not been intentionally ruined.

Keep scrolling, it gets worse.

check out how clean it was! now it looks like a kit car with LED trailer lights and a gold fucking license plate frame. stay classy, Arizona.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Super-wild and strangely beautiful (?) custom. From the photographer's Flickr: "Straight from the set of Thunderbirds. I have no idea what it was except it was in the pretty bay area of Birżebbuġa, Malta in the late 1980's."

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

As featured here last week, I've recently been watching a lot of BBC science documentaries, particularly those hosted by Professor Jim Al-Khalili.

This clip from a 1974 episode of Horizon (American readers: think PBS Nova, similarly excellent and long-running) shows a brand-new Alfa spider being driven from one end of Stanford's Linear Particle Accelerator to the other, 2.0 miles away.

Housed in the longest building in the US, Stanford claims it's also "the world's straightest object." Continuously operating since opening in 1966, the accelerator passes underneath I280 as can be seen about halfway through the clip.

Says the narrator: "Even for an experimenter driving a fast car, it's a long ride, yet the electrons that fly along the accelerator do the journey in 100,000th of a second."

Bonus cool points for the soundtrack--Pink Floyd's "One of These Days" from the album Meddle, one of their spaciest.